


Reprisal

by pr0nz69



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Femdom Overtones, Gen, Human Experimentation, Matriarchal society, Mermaids, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Revenge, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Torture, Transformation, Victorian Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:00:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22982911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr0nz69/pseuds/pr0nz69
Summary: A pod of mermaids gathers under the light of his second moon here. They wield driftwood spears tipped with salvaged steel and carry sacks woven from kelp and reeds.The mermaid who heads the pod bears a face as severe as uncut marble. He suspects she is the matron. While the others look on him with a wild hunger, her eyes do not belie her intentions.“Killer of our sisters,” she says in his tongue.He has had the luxury of a day to think on it; he knows now what this is about.———In the escalating conflict between humans and mermaids, a blood price must be paid.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 59





	Reprisal

**Author's Note:**

> Here’s my piece for the _Secrets of the Sea_ mermaid OC zine! I’m really into body horror lately? So this was a lot of fun to write!
> 
> I had the joy of collaborating with the wonderful artist Wanlingnic on tumblr! Please check out her work (she does lovely monster-boys)! <3 Her art is included here with permission!

The air is humid, pungent with seawater; the scent of salt hangs heavy in his nose. He can hear small waves washing over rocks.

He opens his eyes. Darkness.

He sits up. His body tenses with the echoes of pain. He pulls up his legs, presses his face against them. His trousers are damp, and through a tear in the knee, goose pimples prickle against his cheek. He wraps his arms around himself and shivers.

The nausea passes. He lifts his head. A shaft of light strikes the steely blackness of water several paces off. He follows the light to its source: a small crack in a ceiling of brown stone— a sliver of moonlight. He looks around him—the same brown stone.

He tries to stand, but his legs resist. He turns onto his knees and manages to push himself to his feet but stumbles almost immediately, catching himself against the coarseness of a cave wall. He pauses there to recover his breath.

Did he go overboard? His boots are gone. So are his stockings, his coat, his hat, his cravat, all of his effects. The sleeves of his undershirt are torn up his forearms, and what remains of his waistcoat hangs from his shoulders by threads. His trousers are ripped apart at the ankles. Perhaps he was lost in a storm, but something about it all feels uncomfortably deliberate. Both his clothes and his hair, undone from its ribbon, are soaked through; he can’t have been here for more than a few hours. A cursory search of his person reveals no injuries besides some light bruising to go along with the general soreness of being manhandled. Was he mutinied? But morale has been high since the enactment of the Culling, and he can’t imagine his men turning on him so suddenly…

A disturbance in the water arrests his gaze to the spot within the shaft of light. A shadow flits beneath it—or perhaps he imagined it. His heartbeat ticks out the seconds—one, two—

A figure erupts from the water just beyond the shoreline, soaking him in its spray. Salt stings his eyes; he stumbles back, rubbing them clear.

The creature before him is not unfamiliar to him. She resembles a human female in form, but her skin glistens greenish silver beneath the sweep of light. She wears no clothes, only pearls on braided cords and the gleaming scales that plate her body. Gill flaps sear across her neck, and fins twist from the sides of her head, forking outward. Her fingers, spidering over land as she lifts herself onto it, are long and webbed, terminating in hooked black claws. He doesn’t even need to see her lower half to know that she has no legs.

The mermaid stares, yellow eyes unblinking.

“Do you,” he starts, haltingly. “Do you speak the language of men?”

She does not respond. Her tail, thick enough to encircle and crush him like a boa, flexes, and she uses it to propel herself forward. He staggers back, but she corners him in moments.

She does not attack. Instead, she opens her hand to show him what she is holding. It glints faintly; against his better judgement, he leans forward to make out the words engraved in it:

Captain Arlen Calder

Officer of the Imperial Navy

Commander of the Second Fleet

“My badge,” he says softly, reaching for it. But the mermaid withdraws it, lashing out with her other hand to clamp around his wrist. He yanks his arm back, but her fingers, rough with scales, easily maintain their hold. She’s stronger than he expects, dragging him with her as she retreats back toward the water’s edge.

“No!” he cries, thrashing against her, desperate to break free before she pulls him into the sea with her and drowns him. “Let go! I ordered you to let go!”

She stops once she’s half-submerged. He sits panting on his knees before her, wrist still captured by her hand. “What… do you want with me?”

She dips her claws into his skin—a flash of pain—before hurling his badge over his shoulder. It clatters somewhere out of sight, seeming to shake the walls with its reverberations. The sound stays with him long after she releases him and disappears into the blackness of the sea.

A pod of mermaids gathers under the light of his second moon here. They wield driftwood spears tipped with salvaged steel and carry sacks woven from kelp and reeds.

The mermaid who heads the pod bears a face as severe as uncut marble. He suspects she is the matron. While the others look on him with a wild hunger, her eyes do not belie her intentions.

“Killer of our sisters,” she says in his tongue.

He has had the luxury of a day to think on it; he knows now what this is about.

“I will not deny it,” is his practiced line, “but I will justify it.”

The matron tilts her head.

“Six and four.” When the matron continues to stare at him neutrally, he explains, “In only six months, I have lain four of my men to rest.”

A thorn, long lodged in his heart, pricks it anew.

“Their corpses were mutilated almost beyond recognition. Such barbarism will not be tolerated in our country of laws and shall be met with the full force of the imperial navy. As a senior officer short four good men for no good reason, it was I who proposed the Mermaid Culling—and I who was granted permission to enact it by decree of the emperor himself.”

The matron’s thin lips curl. She addresses the others in their tongue, perhaps in translation, for their faces contort in rage and disgust.

“Take this reprisal against me. Punish me as you will. But know that I have justice on my side. You may kill me, but you cannot stop what has already been set in motion by your own hands.”

Ermin, he thinks, and the thorn lets blood.

The mermaid from his last moon emerges from the pod, eyes catlike in the semi-dark.

“Circe,” the matron says, holding up a hand. She speaks to her in their tongue, then hands her something—a blade, he realizes when it catches under the light, curved like the crescent moon.

To him, she says, “You waste words, man. You do as we say—or pain.”

Arlen is silent.

“Divest now. Or we divest you.”

“ _Divest_?”

“Do not question. Obey.”

The mermaid Circe flashes her sickle-shaped blade in warning. Arlen sets his jaw. “As you will.”

He still has no conception as to the matron’s intentions for him as he begins to undress. The mermaids watch, rapt, as he unbuttons the remains of his waistcoat and shirt and shrugs them off. He avoids their eyes as he slides down his trousers and smallclothes, but the alien whispers that fill the space bring color to his cheek all the same. When he looks up, he finds the mermaids gazing at him in wonder and, in some cases, excitement. The matron, however, maintains her stern glare.

“Sufficient.”

She speaks to the two mermaids nearest her, one carrying a sack and the other shouldering a coil of bullwhip kelp fashioned into a rope, and they hoist themselves out of the water. Arlen falters, shuffling back.

“Stay,” the matron orders, “or punishment.”

Wet hands grasp his ankles.

“Sit.”

He sits. The mermaids slink past him, one on either side. Their bodies breathe the coolness of the sea. One takes his wrists, drawing them behind his back. The other works at binding him.

“Enough of the song and dance,” he manages through stilted breaths. “If you want revenge, then kill me already.”

“Revenge,” matron repeats curiously, and then: “Wasteful.”

She gestures to Circe, who approaches with the curved blade. Arlen braces himself for the first cut, but it does not come. Circe slides the blade from knee to ankle without breaching skin; she is shaving him.

“What is this about?” he demands.

“You speak many words, man,” the matron says. “But I tell: We have breeding season. No mermen. We do not like take your men. We try change. Now we make merman for breeding.”

“‘Make merman for breeding’?” Dread roils in his gut. “What does that mean?”

The matron lays a hand atop his chest, trailing it down past his navel; he squirms. “Strong man. But kill our sisters. Still, mermaids not wasteful; we make you first merman.”

The mermaid with the sack upends it; scales rattle to the ground like silver pieces. She places something beside Circe—a needle carved from a fishbone.

His heart pulses in his throat. Circe sets aside the blade, takes up the needle, and plucks a strand of hair from her head.

The fishbone needle breaks skin with remarkable ease. Arlen grunts, then kicks out a leg on reflex, striking air. The mermaid behind him steadies him, applying pressure to his shoulders. Circe tightens her grip on his ankle before hooking the needle back up through skin. Blood bubbles up from the puncture site, streaking the blue-gray scale settled over it. His toes curl.

“No more,” he begs as Circe threads another scale and lays it atop the previous one. The fishbone needle dips back into flesh. His jaw aches from clenching.

The mosaic of bloodstained scales reaches mid-calf now. He has no conception of the time here, but the moon has slid from the sky, and pale daylight plays ghosts across the walls. He watches them dance alongside his own shadow, which shudders and jerks like a marionette tugged along by its strings.

Circe pulls the thread taut.

“Ermin,” he gasps, without thinking. Circe pauses a moment, then resumes her work.

He remembers, when they found the body, that the legs in particular were full of rot—and hundreds of hard scales. The coroner had suspected, as had he, that Ermin had died after a brutal struggle against the mermaids.

How naive he was.

Long after he’s left alone, Arlen lies on his side, rubbing his legs together. The clicking of the scales disturbs him even more than the slick of blood. The mermaid hair, as if sentient, draws them deeper into flesh. The steady throbbing keeps him from sleep; his third moon was spent in a fevered haze.

Were his arms not tied, he would claw at his legs until the scales came loose in bloody clumps.

A splash reaches his ears; Circe lifts herself up onto the rocks beside him. He stills, feigning sleep.

“Wake,” she orders.

He opens his eyes. “You speak my language?”

She frowns as if parsing out his words. “Mother Calypso teach me man la-la-lang…” She trails off, brow furrowing in frustration.

He turns his eyes away. “Then what do you want?” It doesn’t matter if she can communicate with him; mermaids have always been the enemies of humans.

“C-clean,” she stutters. She places a clawed hand on his right ankle, and he starts, both at the temperature and the proximity to the scales.

“Let go!”

She ignores him, grabbing his other ankle and dragging him toward the rock ledge. He shudders when his feet hit the water; the salt burns his legs, and blood blossoms around them like hyacinths. He hunches forward, shoulders shaking.

When she realizes he doesn’t intend to struggle, Circe releases his legs. For a long while, they persist in silence. Eventually, she dips underwater, and he feels her touch his legs with her claws. He flinches, but she doesn’t harm him. She reemerges some moments later carrying a rusted metal canister apparently retrieved from the depths. She unscrews the lid, then pulls herself up beside him and presses it to his lips.

“Drink.”

A clear liquid sloshes within. “What is it?”

She thinks for a moment, then traces a finger from her eye down to her chin.

“Tears… They are poisonous to humans.”

She pushes it against his lips with more fervor. “Drink.”

They taste like water, slightly sweeter, and he’s so thirsty that he drains the canister.

“Next time”—she brushes a finger up his bare thigh—”more scales.”

“I’ll die before you can conclude this macabre experiment.”

She looks at him quizzically, bottom lip pulled in as if in annoyance.

“You will kill me.”

“Kill,” the mermaid echoes, expression hardening. “Good. I not need man. I not need breed. You—you kill! You kill Andromeda—” She stops herself there.

“Whose tears were those?” Arlen asks, struck by a thought.

She doesn’t look at him.

He sighs. “Then Andromeda was—your sister?”

She casts him a withering look. “All mermaids sisters. But Andromeda…” She either doesn’t have the words or the desire to continue, but Arlen understands her meaning.

“I, too, lost someone,” he says. “My first mate—and dearest companion. Ermin was a fine man, gentle as a dove. He was your last...”

_Project_ , he can’t bring himself to say.

Circe appears to ponder that for a while. “You want have revenge?” she asks at length. He doesn’t answer. “I need have revenge also.”

They bring him fish, deboned and gutted, and he eats it raw. It isn’t as revolting as he might have previously surmised, perhaps because he’s so famished or perhaps because his legs have turned greenish-silver and thin, web-like membranes have started to grow between his toes.

He can’t walk; his feet can’t grip the ground, and his legs are more painful protrusions than functioning appendages.

Circe continues her work, first up his thighs, then his backside. His arms will be next, the matron tells him. His ears start to blister and burn, transmogrifying on their own into fins warped from flesh and cartilage. His heart races with panic each time he bumps them, remembers them.

Circe comments on them once when she finds him despairing: “Very ugly.”

“I am _not_ a merman,” he hisses, “and this _will not_ work!”

She shrugs her shoulders, unsettlingly humanlike. “You die, then die. Not problem for me.” She holds the familiar canister to his lips. “Drink.”

“You’re poisoning me,” he growls even as he drinks deep from the canister.

“Mermaid tears change body.” She tugs on one mutilated ear with her free hand, and he chokes up a mouthful of the liquid. “You are like merman soon.” She pushes the canister to his lips again.

But he turns his head away. “Haven’t you tormented me enough? Just let me die.”

She cocks her head. “You want die?”

“Yes,” he breathes.

She sits back on her tail. “Die forever. Die like Andromeda, _forever_. Die like Er-Er…”

“Ermin,” Arlen says automatically. “I…”

_Forever_. His body is too broken now for him to ever return to human society. But why does her word ring so strongly with him? Why does it fill him with overwhelming terror?

“I live,” Circe says, eyes sharp. “I am getting revenge.”

And yet it’s only when he drags himself to the shoreline and thrusts his head beneath the black water to drown himself that he fully realizes the terror of eternity.

The lacerations that have split across his throat are gills.

When the bones in his fingers jut forward and curve with claws and his arms are marbled with scales, the mermaids chain his legs to a rock and leave his ruined arms free. With clumsy, painful fingers, he can’t undo his bonds.

He thinks about what Circe said a lot, after his suicide attempt.

She comes to him while he’s cooling his legs in the water, and something about her movements are erratic, unlike her.

“You try die again?”

“No.”

“Good.” She folds her arms over his knees and rests her chin on them. He hasn’t the motivation or even the interest in shaking her off; he’s long grown accustomed to being handled by her and the others.

“Of what concern is it to you? You told me before you do not wish to breed.”

Circe glares up at him. “I need revenge. I _get_ revenge. Look at you. So ugly. Not human now. You are ugly beast!”

Arlen laughs, a hollow sound. “You’re right. What future have I amongst humans now?”

“Yes,” she agrees. “So—” She reaches out a hand, fingers the chain binding him to the rock. “Maybe you have revenge—for Ermin.”

He feels a flutter of hope in his heart, something he thought long dead. “Revenge?” he finds himself asking.

“Yes. I not care. I hate you. I hate humans. But you want have revenge, yes? I not want you here. When you are here, I think of Andromeda, always. It is painful. And I… I know losing love. I know it. So… So have revenge.”

Arlen hesitates. “Even if that revenge is against you?”

She laughs. “You try. You not kill me.” She heaves herself up beside him, gently caresses his cheek. “I look toward it.”

She takes the chain into both hands and snaps it in two.


End file.
